People who work with Node.js could tell you what’s actually wrong with the language. I can only complain about the surface-level issues. But here’s a big one: starting a Node server (and its inevitable Mongo database) is a pain in the butt.

Whereas it’s trivially easy to get a Ruby or PHP server running all the time through Apache, Node.js prefers to be started manually. I’m not happy with any of the daemons I’ve found to automate these things.

Luckily I have Automator.

After a few days of poking around I’ve written a script that starts the database, web server, then loads Chrome and hits the URLs for my app and its debug monitor. I share them with you all in the hope that your Node woes will be absolved.